V
It was again April, extremely early in the morning and month, and thickly cold, when Brevet-Major Elim Meikeljohn, burning with the fever of a re-opened old saber wound, strayed away from his command in the direction of Richmond. His thoughts revolved with the rapidity of a pinwheel, throwing off crackling ideas, illuminated with blinding spurts and exploding colors, in every direction. A vague persistent pressure sent him toward the city. It was being evacuated; the Union forces, he knew, were to enter at dawn; but he had stumbled ahead, careless of consequences, oblivious of possible reprisal.
He was, he recognized by the greater blackness ahead, near the outskirts of the city—for Richmond was burning. The towering black mass of smoke was growing more perceptible in the slowly lightening dawn. Elim Meikeljohn could now hear the low sullen uprush of flames, the faint crackling of timbers, and a hot aromatic odor met him in faint waves.
His scabbard beat awkwardly about his heels, and he impatiently unhooked it and threw it into the gloom of the roadside. The service revolver was still in its holster; but he had forgotten its presence and use. In the multicolored confusion of his mind but one conscious impression remained; and, in its reiteration, he said aloud, over and over, in dull tones, “Two, Linden Row.”
The words held no concrete meaning, they constructed no vision, embodied no tangible desire; they were merely the mechanical expression of an obscure and dominating impulse. He was hardly more sensate in his progress than a nail drawn irresistibly by a magnet.
The gray mist dissolved, and his long haggard face grew visible; it had not aged in the past four years of struggle—almost from boyhood it had been marked with somber longitudinal lines—but it had grown keener, more intense, with the expression of a man whose body had starved through a great spiritual conflict. His uniform, creased and stained, and now silvery with dew, flapped about a gaunt ironlike frame; and from under the leather peak of his kepi, even in his fever, his eyes burned steady and compelling.
Scattered houses, seemingly as unsubstantial as shadows, gathered about him; they grew more frequent, joined shoulder to shoulder, and he was in a city street. On the left he caught a glimpse of the river, solid and smooth and unshining; a knot of men passed shouting hoarsely, and a wave of heat swept over him like a choking cloth. Like the morning, his mind partially cleared, people and scenes grew coherent. The former were a disheveled and rioting rabble; the conflagration spread in lurid waves.
The great stores of the tobacco warehouses had been set on fire, and the spanning flames threatened the entire city. The rich odor of the burning tobacco leaves rolled over the streets in drifting showers of ruby sparks. The groups on the streets resolved into individuals. Elim saw a hulking woman, with her waist torn from grimy shoulders, cursing the retreating Confederate troops with uplifted quivering fists; he saw soldiers in gray joined to shifty town characters furtively bearing away swollen sacks; carriages with plunging frenzied horses, a man with white-faced and despairingly calm women. He stopped hurrying in the opposite direction and demanded:
“Two, Linden Row?”
The other waved a vague arm toward the right and broke away.
The street mounted sharply and Elim passed an open space teeming with hurrying forms, shrill with cries lost in the drumming roar of the flames. Every third man was drunk. He passed fights, bestial grimaces, heard the fretful crack of revolvers. The great storehouses were now below him, and he could see the shuddering inky masses of smoke blotting out quarter after quarter. He was on a more important thoroughfare now, and inquired again:
“Two, Linden Row?”
This man ejaculated:
“The Yankees are here!” The fact seemed to stupefy him, and he stood with hanging hands and mouth.
Elim Meikeljohn repeated his query and was answered by a negro who had joined them.
“On ahead, capt'n,” he volunteered; “fourth turn past the capitol and first crossing.”
The other regained his speech and began to curse the negro and Elim, but the latter moved swiftly on.
Above him, through the shifting tenebrous banks, he saw a classic white building on a patch of incredible greenery, infinitely remote; and then from the center of the city came a deafening explosion, a great sullen sheet of flame, followed by flashes like lightning in the settling blackness.
“The powder magazines,” Elim heard repeated from person to person. An irregular file of Confederate soldiers galloped past him, and the echo of their hoofs had hardly died before a troop of mounted Union cavalry, with slanting carbines, rode at their heels. They belonged, Elim recognized, to Kautz' command.
He had now reached the fourth turn beyond the withdrawn vision of the capitol, and he advanced through a black snowing of soot. Flames, fanlike and pallid, now flickered about his feet, streamed in the gutters and lapped the curbs. He saw heaps of broken bottles against the bricks, and the smell of fine spilled wines and liquors hung in his nostrils. His reason again wavered—the tremendous spectacle of burning assumed an apocalyptic appearance, as if the city had burst spontaneously into flame from the passionate and evil spirits engendered and liberated by war.
He stopped at the first crossing and saw before him a row of tall brick houses, built solidly and set behind small yards and a low iron fencing. They had shallow porticoes with iron grilling, and at this end a towering magnolia tree swept its new glossy greenery against the third-story windows.
“Linden Row,” he muttered. “Well—Number Two?”
He swung back a creaking gate and went up a flight of bricked steps to the door. He had guessed right; above a brass knocker filmed with the floating muck of the air he saw the numeral, Two, painted beneath the fanlight. The windows on the left were blank, curtained. The house rose silent and without a mark of life above the obscene clamor of the city. He knocked sharply and waited; then he knocked again. Nothing broke the stillness of the façade, the interior. He tried the door, but it was solidly barred. Then a second fact, a memory, joined the bare location in his brain. It was a name—Rose—Rosemary Roselle. He beat with an emaciated fist on the paneling and called, “Roselle! Roselle!”
There was a faint answering stir within; he heard the rattle of a chain; the door swung back upon an apparently empty and cavernous cool hall.